Oprah sued for defamation by ex-girls school head

October 07, 2008

PHILADELPHIA — The ex-headmistress of Oprah Winfrey’s school for girls in South Africa sued the talk show host for defamation for remarks the school administrator believes suggest she tried to cover up abuse at the school.

Winfrey falsely suggested in widely reported remarks last year that Nomvuyo Mzamane, 39, knew about the alleged abuse by a dorm matron and tried to cover it up, Mzamane says in the suit.

Her suit, filed in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court on Friday, seeks more than $250,000 on five defamation and related counts from Winfrey and her production company.

“The thing that hurt my client the most was when Oprah said, ’I thought she cared about the girls of South Africa,”’ said Mzamane’s lawyer Timothy McGowan. “It was devastating. She loved those girls.”

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A spokeswoman for Winfrey says the company has not seen the suit and plans no immediate comment.

Former dorm matron Tiny Virginia Makopo, 28, is charged with abusing six students at the $40 million school for poor girls. She allegedly tried to kiss and fondle the victims and is also accused of kicking and hitting some of them.

Makopo has pleaded innocent to 14 charges of indecent assault, assault and criminal injury. Her trial is scheduled to resume later this month in South Africa.

Mzamane, a native of Teyateneneng, Lesotho, came to the United States for college and graduate school. She previously held a leadership post at the Germantown Friends School, a Quaker school in Philadelphia.

Winfrey learned of her background and recruited her in late 2006 to run the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls near Johannesburg. Mzamane worked at the school from about January 2007 through October 2007, when she learned, during a meeting with Winfrey in Chicago, that allegations of sexual and physical abuse had surfaced and she was being put on leave.

Her contract, which paid about $150,000 a year, was not renewed after December. She now is back in Philadelphia, but cannot find work in her field because Winfrey’s remarks about her are easily found on the Internet, McGowan said.

The lawsuit cited several specific statements that Mzamane claims were “destructive and entirely false.”

After an October 2007 visit to the school, Winfrey said of Mzamane: “I trusted her. When I appointed her, I thought she was passionate about the children of Africa … but I’ve been disappointed.”

The next month, Winfrey spoke at a news conference in which she said students “had apparently been living in an atmosphere that repressed their voices” and that some students “felt that previously their voices had not been heard by other adults on campus.”

The lawsuit claims that someone hearing those comments and others by Winfrey would conclude Mzamane knew of the alleged abuse and was actively involved in covering it up. The lawsuit says that’s not true.

McGowan said that Winfrey herself spent considerable time at the school — sometimes staying for as long as a month — and questioned why she did not hear about the allegations.

“I want to know who else was there (when the allegations surfaced),” he said. “Did these things happen at the time Oprah was there?”